"This discomfort is shared with so many famous men that I should be inclined to regard it as a distinction," cried the young idealist, with much ardor and little logic, as usual.
"That's as much as to say you would like to be descended from a tailor because Goethe was," said the general, dryly. Not thinking of any answer to this, the young man said "Hem!" and pulled his moustache. "And you would like to wear a hump, because Æsop did," smiled the general.
"My dear general," put in the poet, "what has a hump to do with low birth?"
"Nothing intrinsically, and yet these two things do meet at one point. The first is an imaginary evil, while the other is a positive one; but they are alike in the bad influence which they may exert on the character."
"Oh, general!" laughed the hostess.
"With your permission," he went on, "I will tell you a story to illustrate my paradox, which I see you don't accept at present: a very simple story, of something which I witnessed myself."
"We are all ears," simpered the host, and passed a fat hand over the two pomaded cupid's wings, which stuck up on either side his head. "Very interesting, I am sure," said the hostess, in the politely condescending manner of her great prototype. The poet and the poetess made satirical faces, the idealist craned his neck forward, eager to listen.
The general gazed thoughtfully before him for a while, then he began, speaking slowly:
"He went by the name of Zwilk: by rights it was Zwilch; but after he was promoted for some brilliant deed of arms or other, he never called himself anything but Zwilk von Zwilneck. He liked the title so much that he wrote it on all his books, and bought books that he never read, in order to write it on them.
"No one knew anything about his origin. Sometimes he passed for the son of a crowned head and a dancer. I think he set this story going himself. Sometimes he passed for the son of a sacristan in Reichenhall. He never mentioned his family; he never went home; he received no letters, excepting those which came from comrades in the regiment. Only once did a letter arrive for him, which was plainly not from a brother officer. It was a narrow, greenish, forlorn-looking missive, with the address written zigzag, and the sealing wax spattered all over the cover. They brought it to him in the coffeehouse, and he turned quite red when the waiter presented it 'Ah, yes,' he said, stiffly, through his nose. 'A letter from my old nurse.' Heaven knows why we didn't believe much in that old nurse.